A coffeehouse on the linguistic frontier

Abstract

A century ago, Bihar/Bihor County was a rather unremarkable corner of the Hungarian Kingdom, one situated far from international boundaries. The population of Bihar/Bihor was almost equally split between ethnic Hungarians and ethnic Romanians, a fact of little consequence until the last decades of the nineteenth century, when a number of middle-class national activists began to emphasize the region’s status as a national borderland and worked to define and defend the Hungarian-Romanian border they saw running through it. This essay explores the nationalists’ efforts through a local cultural association, A Biharvármegyei Népnevelési Egyesület (Bihar County Society for Popular Education). Its aim is to show that the sharp lines that appeared on maps of “the nationalities of Austria-Hungary” emerged in a particular historical context, and also that these lines were much more blurry than many mapmakers and historians would have us believe.